What does that mean? Repertoire – small and ever shrinking; range of music – selected symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms, many operas, Viennese music; appearances – sporadic and increasingly rare; baton technique – superb; musicality – unmatched; charisma and communication – a class of his own. What an intriguing, contradictory figure he presents, made all the more alluring by his refusal to play the media game. A figure ripe, then, for a documentary – or two – and despite sharing many of the same talking heads and some archive footage, these films complement each other as character studies rather than career narratives. Both have extensive excerpts of Kleiber in rehearsal, enabling us to see how he strove for the perfection that marked him as a musician and plagued him as a man, capturing in his expressive face both the ecstasy and frustration of the process. Watching him, one begins to understand the result of the poll and why so many fine musicians revered him. The musical results aside, for charm and screen presence Kleiber is off the score-card.

Georg Wübbolt’s I am Lost to the World includes a rare radio interview with Kleiber and emphasises the destructive/inspirational relationship with his famous conductor father Erich. It is by no means a hagiographic portrait (“He made a fool of a lot of people,” says one contributor. “That was not nice.”) and is frank about his serial womanising. The film is somewhat spoilt by the occasional intrusive narration voiced by an accented German bass-baritone in imperfect English (“Kleiber has always forewent Berlin”).

“Traces to Nowhere” directed by Eric Schulz boasts contributions from Kleiber’s sister Veronika (serene, thoughtful), Plácido Domingo (under-prepared) and Brigitte Fassbaender (clearly a close friend). Schultz book-ends the film by following the road back to Konj≈ica, Kleiber’s Slovenia hideaway where he was found dead by one of his two children (neither of whom is referred to in either film). Suicide? Probably not; but he refused medical intervention for an easily treatable prostate cancer. It was only after his funeral a week later that his death was made public. Very Kleiber. “As far as possible you should leave no traces behind in life” was a favourite Chinese saying of his. The fact that we have such vivid traces on film and disc is cause to rejoice for, as one musician who played under him says of his exhilarating Die Fledermaus Overture (but really referring to all Kleiber performances): “You can do it differently, of course, but you definitely can’t do it better. Actually,” he adds after a pause, “I don’t even think you can do it differently.”